Bojan Papić (Author), Margo Diricks (Author), Darja Kušar (Author)

Abstract

Paenibacillus larvae causes the American foulbrood (AFB), a highly contagious and devastating disease of honeybees. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) has been increasingly used in bacterial pathogen typing, but rarely applied to study the epidemiology of P. larvae. To this end, we used 125 P. larvae genomes representative of a species-wide diversity to construct a stable whole-genome multilocus sequence typing (wgMLST) scheme consisting of 5745 loci. A total of 51 P. larvae isolates originating from AFB outbreaks in Slovenia were used to assess the epidemiological applicability of the developed wgMLST scheme. In addition, wgMLST was compared with the core-genome MLST (cgMLST) and whole-genome single nucleotide polymorphism (wgSNP) analyses. All three approaches successfully identified clusters of outbreak-associated strains, which were clearly separated from the epidemiologically unlinked isolates. High levels of backward comparability of WGS-based analyses with conventional typing methods (ERIC-PCR and MLST) were revealed; however, both conventional methods lacked sufficient discriminatory power to separate the outbreak clusters. The developed wgMLST scheme provides an improved understanding of the intra- and inter-outbreak genetic diversity of P. larvae and represents an important progress in unraveling the genomic epidemiology of this important honeybee pathogen.

Keywords

Paenibacillus larvae;American foulbrood;whole-genome sequencing;whole-genome multilocus sequence typing;core-genome multilocus sequence typing;whole-genome single nucleotide polymorphism;genotype;molecular sequence;

Data

Language: English
Year of publishing:
Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
Organization: UL VF - Veterinary Faculty
UDC: 577
COBISS: 53310723 Link will open in a new window
ISSN: 2297-1769
Views: 357
Downloads: 111
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Other data

Secondary keywords: Paenibacillus larvae;Whole Genome Sequencing;Genotype;Molecular Sequence;
Type (COBISS): Article
Pages: art. 582677, str. 1-15
Issue: ǂVol. ǂ8
Chronology: 2021
DOI: 10.3389/fvets.2021.582677
ID: 13689614